I want to create ed tech that gets kids to love learning. I started with a vocabulary app.

I performed pretty well in school but my motivation was entirely performance/competition based, I tried to get the best grade possible and didn't care about what I was learning.

Fast forward to when I started my first job (software), I realized that it's actually both helpful and fun to be curious, question the world, and learn new things. But I really wish I figured this out when I was 12 instead of 22, because I could've learned a lot in that decade.

For example, I studied hard in calculus because I wanted a good GPA. I figured I would never need to use it again. But this year I started studying machine learning for my job (I work with a lot of machine learning scientists), and it's entirely based on calculus. Would've paid way more attention if I knew what it was USED for instead of just learning how to compute derivatives.

Anyways, now I have this dream of helping with educational reform, and getting kids more excited about what they're learning and HOW what they're learning is useful in the world. And I know this will probably piss a lot of people in this subreddit off, but I do think that recent advancements in AI will help achieve this goal. Voice generation, video generation, and more can all be used to help create engaging content for kids, rather than hearing from a guy who is just counting down the years until his pension locks in and he can quit.

So, I've started with a vocabulary app that teaches by letting you see words in-context, over and over. It allows you to take simple, fill in the blank quizzes that are created from a large library of example sentences. It's full of advanced but commonly used words like "esoteric", "ephemeral", "vicissitude", etc... The idea is that seeing words is what actually teaches you what a word means and how to use it, as opposed to looking at the definition.

The app is called "nodu" on the Apple app store if you're interested.

Would love to hear others thoughts on how you see education changing over the next 20 years.

Submitted December 17, 2024 at 08:12AM by Agile_Mycologist3527 https://ift.tt/yd86ps9